[Dialogue] 'The New Right-Wing Smear Machine' from The Nation

[Harry Wainwright]

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at
special discounted rates. You can order online at
https://ssl.thenation.com/sumo/EMAILARTLINK or call our toll-free number
at 1-800-333-8536.

Thought you would be interested in this article from The Nation.

   The New Right-Wing Smear Machine 
   by Christopher Hayes


On February 27, 2001,
two members of the American Gold Star Mothers, an organization of women
who've lost sons or daughters in combat, dropped by the temporary
basement offices of the new junior senator from New York, Hillary
Clinton. They didn't have an appointment, and the office, which had been
up and running for barely a month, was a bit discombobulated. The two
women wanted to talk to the senator about a bill pending in the Senate
that would provide annuities for the parents of those killed, but they
were told that Clinton wasn't in the office and that the relevant staff
members were otherwise engaged. The organization later submitted a
formal request in writing for a meeting, which Clinton granted, meeting
and posing for pictures with four members of the group. 

But the story doesn't end there. In May of that year, the right-wing
website NewsMax, a clearinghouse for innuendo and rumor, ran a
short item with the headline "Hillary Snubs Gold Star Mothers."
Reporting via hearsay--a comment relayed to someone who then recounted
it to the column's author--the article claimed that Clinton and her
staff "simply refused" to meet with the Gold Star Mothers, making hers
the "only office" in the Senate that snubbed the group. 

At first the item didn't attract much attention, but it quickly
morphed into an e-mail that started ricocheting across the Internet.
"Bet this never hits the TV news!" began one version. "According to
NewsMax.com there was only one politician in DC who refused to meet with
these ladies. Can you guess which politician that might be?... None
other than the Queen herself--the Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton." 

Before long, the Gold Star Mothers and the Clinton office found
themselves inundated by inquiries about the "snub," prompting the Gold
Star Mothers to post a small item debunking the claim on their website.
When that didn't stem the tide, they posted a lengthier notice. "These
allegations were not initiated by the Gold Star Mothers.... This is a
fabricated report picked up by an individual using the Gold Star Mothers
as an instrument to discredit Senator Clinton.... We do not need
mischeivous gossip and unfounded lies to promote our organization.
Please help stop it now." 

That plea notwithstanding, the e-mail continues to circulate to this
day. Anyone who's been following politics for the past fifteen years
won't be surprised to find Hillary Clinton the subject of a false and
damning right-wing smear. We've all become familiar with the ways the
Republican noise machine transmits lurid bits of misinformation and
tendentious attacks from the conservative fringe into the heart of
American political discourse, the process by which a slightly
misdelivered joke by John Kerry attracts the ire of Rush Limbaugh and
ends up on the front page of the New York Times. 

But in some senses, the kind of under-the-radar attack embodied in
the Gold Star e-mail--which never made the jump to Fox or Drudge--is
even harder to deal with. "It's a Pandora's box," says Jim Kennedy, who
served as Clinton's communications director during her first Senate
term. "Once [the charges] are out in the ether, they are very hard to
combat. It's very unlike a traditional media, newspaper or TV show, or
even a blog, which at least has a fixed point of reference. You know
they're traveling far and wide, but there's no way to rebut them with
all the people that have seen them."

Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the
dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny
directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as
potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of
Kerry's performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing
circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began
circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a
radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed
through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has
continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked
by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of
the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most
of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox. 

In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing
model of the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its
approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the
manufactured outrage over Kerry's botched joke about George Bush's study
habits was the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star
Mother smear was like one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a
skateboard on YouTube. Of course, some of those videos end up with 25
million page views. And now that large media companies understand their
potential, they've begun trying to create their own. Which prompts the
obvious question: if a handful of millionaires and disgruntled Swift
Boat Veterans were able to sabotage Kerry's campaign in 2004, what kind
of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a few political operatives armed
with little more than Outlook and a talent for gossip? 

The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of
Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically
disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates
is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a
staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal
genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled
quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult
talking...during the playing of the National Anthem--kick their ass") to
treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two
defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ...and the
American Soldier"). 

For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with
talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real
stories that the mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!"
says Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey,
who describes his politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I
forwarded every one on, everyone would hate me.... I'm trying to cut
back. I try to send no more than two or three a day. I must get thirty
or forty a day." 

Mike D'Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York,
received so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog
called MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting
recipients. "I suddenly have connected to all these people who receive
these right-wing forwards from their brothers-in-law," D'Asto told me.
"Surprisingly, a very large number of people receive these."

And that, of course, is the problem. 

Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself
(throughout Thomas Jefferson's presidency opposition newspapers and
pamphlets spread the word of his affair with Sally Hemings), but never
has there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous
diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. David Mikkelson, who, along with
his wife, Barbara, founded and runs the website Snopes.com, knows this
better than anyone. Devoted exclusively to debunking (and occasionally
confirming) urban legends and e-mail-circulated apocrypha, Snopes
attracts 4-5 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the
Internet's most popular sites. In the early days, Mikkelson says, there
were hardly any political urban legends, but that changed in 2000. "A
lot of the things that were circulating in the world at large, things
like ridiculing Al Gore for supposedly inventing the Internet," started
to be passed along via e-mail, as well as "a photograph of Gore holding
a gun intended to mock him for not holding it safely." 

>From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated
rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about
George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting
wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of
real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the
twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives,
these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the
world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants,
hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and
conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy
and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal
media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth
out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the
actual characters are interchangeable. 

"A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in
2000 were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry," says John Ratliff, who
runs a site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself
to debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate
committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned
Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be
dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al
Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to
John Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour,"
Ratliff says. 

Even if many of the tropes were consistent, the tenor of the e-mails
grew more aggressive between 2000 and 2004. "It got really nasty," says
Ratliff. "You started seeing things reported as real news that, if you
looked into it, you realized was opinion or supposition or someone
trying to discredit another candidate through character assassination.
You saw a lot of chain letters that purported to be from members of the
Swift Boat group or firsthand accounts of people who supposedly had
experience with Kerry in Vietnam. A lot of them didn't check out." 

Aside from specious allegations about his military service, many of
the e-mails attacking Kerry either emphasized his wealth (photos of each
of his five residences) or relayed putative firsthand accounts of the
senator acting like an imperious prick. Hal Cranmer, a former Air Force
pilot, wrote a widely circulated account of his experience flying Kerry
around Vietnam and Cambodia in 1991 in which Kerry scarfs pizza meant
for the crew, forces the pilots to sit for an hour in an
un-air-conditioned plane and boasts that he "never sail[s] on anything
less than 135 feet." (Since it's a matter of historical record that
Kerry has sailed boats smaller than 135 feet, this quote seems highly
dubious.) 

When I tracked down Cranmer during his lunch break at the aerospace
manufacturing firm he works for in Minnesota, I was surprised to hear
him ruefully recall his brush with Internet fame. "It gave me a real
lesson. My wife says one of the reasons she married me is that I don't
talk badly about people," he said with a laugh. "I really didn't mean to
do that here." 

In spring 2004, as John Kerry began to emerge as the probable
nominee, Cranmer e-mailed his account to the libertarian website
LewRockwell.com, where readers were sharing their personal experiences
about meeting Kerry. "I said, OK, I'll put in my two cents.... I thought
maybe I'd get one or two e-mails about it and it would just disappear."
That was not to be. "All of a sudden I was getting fifty e-mails a day.
I had an annual meeting with the Air Force pilots, and a friend said,
'Tell your story about John Kerry,' and everyone in the room was going,
'I got that e-mail! That was you?' I had neighbors walking in and
saying, 'Hey, I got an e-mail about you.' I was trying to keep this
low-key, not try to ruin an election here. I was just relating an
experience that happened to me. People drew all kinds of crazy
conclusions from it other than I had a bad experience with him." Added
Cranmer, "Maybe he's the nicest guy in the world, and he was in a bad
mood going into Vietnam.... I really didn't mean this to be as huge as
it was." 

Cranmer told me he was a libertarian and a big fan of Ron Paul. "I
voted for Bush in 2000 and have regretted it ever since. I didn't even
vote in 2004." He now wishes he'd kept his impressions to himself. Some
anecdote of casual thoughtlessness "shouldn't be what defines the
presidency."

But of course, that's exactly the kind of thing that did define the
last presidential election. Cranmer's e-mail, and those of a similar
ilk, were perfectly in line with the broader narrative of the Bush
campaign, in which the major knock on Kerry was that he was an elitist,
disingenuous jerk--a "bad man," in Lynne Cheney's phrasing. Like the
other popular e-mails that circulated in 2004, Cranmer's includes not a
single substantive criticism of Kerry's platform or policy preferences,
but the unflattering picture it offers has an effect that's immediate
and visceral. It lingers in the back of one's head. 

It was similar gossip that helped spell doom for John McCain during
the South Carolina primary in 2000, when a whisper campaign spread
rumors that he had a black daughter out of wedlock. "John McCain was
done in by leaflets put on cars in church parking lots," says Democratic
campaign consultant Chris Lehane. Forwarded e-mails, he says, "are the
digital version of this and potentially more pernicious and far-reaching
because of the obvious efficiencies of the online world. I would fully
expect to see it manifesting in the GOP primary." Sure enough, a few
weeks after I spoke to Lehane, Mike Huckabee's Iowa state campaign
chair, Bob Vander Plaats, issued a statement denying that he'd written
an e-mail that voters had received bearing his name. In that hoax
e-mail, someone impersonating Vander Plaats announced that he was
dropping Huckabee because of low fundraising numbers and backing Mitt
Romney instead and urging others to do the same. 

Faced with dubious attacks, circulating below the radar, campaigns
find themselves in a familiar bind, one that handcuffed Kerry in 2004
when the Swift Boat charges first cropped up in ads, talk-radio and
e-mail. If you respond, you run the risk of bringing the original false
accusation to a wider audience. This is particularly true when the
e-mails don't even have a putative author attached. "For lots of these
e-mails, there's never any definable source," says Mikkelson. "They just
seem to come out of nowhere." 

That leads to the $64,000 question: are these anonymous attacks
organic emanations of the diffuse political consciousness, or are they
deliberately seeded by professional political operators? Mikkelson is
skeptical that anyone could intentionally write the kind of e-mail that
would take off virally. "Even people who are steeped in it, it's very,
very difficult to start something deliberately that will catch on."
Still, there's some evidence it's been done. Snopes determined that a
gushing pro-Bush e-mail from 2004 about watching the President worship
in the pews of St. John's Church in Washington was actually written by
the press spokeswoman for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander. Her name
is Laura Lefler, and she now works for Senator Bob Corker. I tried to
contact Lefler to get a sense of what inspired her to write the e-mail
and how, exactly, she disseminated it, but she wouldn't return my calls
or e-mails. 

The most notorious smear forward of this cycle is the Obama/madrassa
canard, which represents the cutting edge of electronic rumor. At least
two weeks before the Obama/madrassa smear appeared in the online
magazine Insight, on January 17, it had been circulating widely
in an e-mail forward that laid out the basics of Obama's bio in a flat,
reportorial tone before concluding thus: 

Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that
he is a Muslim.... Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's
mother...introduced his stepson to Islam. Osama was enrolled in a Wahabi
school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the radical teaching that is followed by
the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western
world. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when seeking
major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has
joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim
background.
 Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's
expected presidential candidacy. 

Did you catch that typo in the crucial sentence? And the strategic
deployment of Obama's middle name? It's a coldly effective bit of
slander: a single damning lie (the school Obama attended was a
run-of-the mill public elementary school) snuggled tightly within a
litany of mundane facts, followed by dark insinuation.

Who wrote it? The unsatisfying answer is, we'll probably never know.
"The thing to keep in mind about e-mail is that there is absolutely zero
built-in security or data integrity," my friend Paul Smith, a software
developer with EveryBlock.com, explained to me when I asked him if there
was any way I could trace the Obama e-mail to its original author.
"That's why there is spam. I could construct an e-mail from scratch and
deliver it and have it seem like it was coming from Steve Jobs, and for
all intents and purposes the receiver would have no way of knowing it
wasn't from Cupertino." 

But even if the identity of the e-mail's author was unrecoverable,
it was still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin
proved even more bizarre than I could have guessed. 

On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his
much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial
Republican Senate candidate and self-described "independent contrarian
columnist" named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced
a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having "lied to
the American people" and "misrepresent[ed] his own heritage." 

Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but
focused on him attempting to hide his Muslim past. "It may well be that
his concealment is meant to endanger Israel," read Martin's statement.
"His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many
Jewish circles where Obama now enjoys support." 

A quick word about Andy Martin. During a 1983 bankruptcy case he
referred to a federal judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history
of lying and thieving common to members of his race." Martin, who in the
past was known as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious
litigants in the history of the United States. He's filed hundreds,
possibly thousands, of lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled
against him, or media outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion
by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta,
described these lawsuits as "a cruel and effective weapon against his
enemies," and called Martin a "notoriously vexatious and vindictive
litigator who has long abused the American legal system." He once even
attempted to intervene in the divorce proceedings of a judge who'd ruled
against him, petitioning the state court to be appointed as the guardian
of the judge's children. 

When I asked Martin for the source of his allegations about Obama's
past, he told me they came from "people in London, among other places."
Why London, I asked? "I started talking to them about Kenyan law. Every
little morsel led me a little farther along." 

Within a few days of Martin's press conference, the conservative
site Free Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment
thread, but after that small blip the specious "questions" about Obama's
background disappeared. Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that
Obama was considering a presidential run, murmurs on the Internet
resumed. In October a conservative blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance
reposted the Andy Martin press release under the title "Is Barack Obama
Lying About His Life Story?" A few days later the online
RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release in
response to a reader's inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in
December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the
web raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who
co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John
McCain of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin's original
press release. "When Obama was six," Sampley wrote, "his mother, an
atheist, married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to
Jakarta, Indonesia.... Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta's
Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created
the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the
world." 

On December 29, 2006, the very same day that Sampley posted his
column, Snopes received its first copy of the e-mail forward, which
contains an identical charge in strikingly similar language. Given the
timing, it seems likely that it was a distillation of Sampley's work.

Despite the fact that CNN and others have thoroughly debunked the
smear, the original false accusation has clearly sunk into people's
consciousness. One Obama organizer told me recently that every day,
while calling prospective voters, he gets at least one or two people who
tell him they won't be voting for Obama because he's a Muslim. According
to Google, "Barack Obama Muslim" is the third most-searched term for the
Illinois senator. And an August CBS poll found that when voters were
asked to give Obama's religion, as many said Muslim as correctly
answered Protestant. 

Oh yeah. And the e-mail continues to circulate. 

"Everybody started calling me" when the e-mail first made the
rounds, Andy Martin told me. "They said, 'Hey, did you write this?' My
answer was 'they are all my children.' "



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071112/hayes



Visit The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/

Subscribe to The Nation:
https://ssl.thenation.com/